What’s Natural About Capital? Agroecology as Resistance to the New Frontier of Colonial Capitalist Carbon Farming

The recent acceleration of the financialisation of nature, in which a farmer's role as a good custodian of land has shifted from a moral obligation to an economic opportunity, has expanded capitalism's spheres of accumulation beyond agricultural commodities to the very building blocks they rely upon: water, carbon, and biodiversity. This "metabolic shift" [Moore, Jason W. 2017. "Metabolic Rift or Metabolic Shift? Dialectics, Nature, and the World-Historical Method." Theory and Society 46 (4): 285–318. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-017-9290-6] deepens the metabolic rift between economy and ecology in a self-defeating repudiation of farmers' environmental values. The resulting hegemony in neoliberal colonial capitalism is accelerating rather than ameliorating climate change and biodiversity loss. In this paper, I analyse the values and activities of three farmer organisations in what is now called Australia, concluding that it is in convivial, not capitalist, agriculture – agroecology – that we will find intergenerational and decolonial justice and assure everyone's right to flourish in common.